An 1886 lawsuit filed by the state of Texas against famed rancher Charles Goodnight might have been forgotten history if it did not win state archivists’ attention last summer.

The yellowed, incomplete file from Donley County is an example of the state’s rich heritage that a group of lawyers, judges and others hope to preserve before the documents waste away.

Since 2009, the Texas Court Records Preservation Task Force has scoured more than 500 storage facilities across the state for historic courthouse documents that record the lives of the earliest Texans.

The Goodnight lawsuit, which will be preserved at the state’s cost, is one of 21 documents the task force has identified as the most important historical documents in Texas.

In the late 1880s, the expansive open ranges of West Texas were ground zero for a burgeoning fight about ranchers using barbed wire for the first time to fence their land. Goodnight had become one of the largest purchasers of barbed wire, and state attorneys asked a Donley County judge to halt Goodnight’s efforts because he fenced in state-owned land.

Goodnight won at trial, but the case sparked “many years of additional battles between large Panhandle ranches and the state of Texas over the fencing of Texas ranges,” the task force said.

The all-volunteer task force, created by the Texas Supreme Court, considers a historical court record as a document dating before 1951, according to the Texas State Library and Archive Commission’s preservation standards.

In surveys the task force distributed to every county and district clerk in Texas, workers in Panhandle counties stressed many of the same concerns: lack of funding, disaster preparedness and recovery, and the need for additional staff.

But storage methods varied between Panhandle counties, according to the surveys.

Donley County District Clerk Fay Vargas needed more room to store courthouse records, so a few years ago she asked county commissioners to buy a tractor-trailer outfitted with electricity and shelves for file storage.

Gray County Clerk Susan Winborne and former Hutchinson County District Clerk Joan Carder reported the counties had no current preservation efforts, the surveys said.

“Adequate funding is our main deterrent. Training and more personnel is also a need,” Carder wrote. “The cost of an additional employee might be $25,000 to $30,000 annually.”

In Potter County, Sandra Hanna’s office is the command center for the county’s recordkeeping.

Hanna, the county’s records manager, favors microfilming over any other alternatives, and her expenses bear that out. Her office requested $439,157 in the 2011-12 budget and received just more than $400,000, she said.

Her staff includes three employees who film documents, two quality checkers and one person who processes the film in a darkroom, Hanna said.

But every year, Hanna budgets enough money to attend a records management conference that attracts an international audience, which helps her stay aware of the latest preservation methods, she said.

“Some of these smaller counties, there is just not enough revenue coming in for that,” she said. “These are the people who write the books on records management, so if you can’t go to that, you wouldn’t know about it.”

The county’s most historically significant finds over the years include documentation of the first black man to sit on a Potter County grand jury, Matthew “Bones” Hooks, and the county’s first district court case, in which county judge and mayor Lon D. Marrs fatally shot a constable, Hanna said.

Hanna said microfilm processing, if counties can afford it, is the best insurance policy for aging documents, since electronic records are stored on a hard drive that can easily be wiped out.

Hanna’s office microfilms the documents, which are stored in the basement of the Potter County District Courts building, and uses an elaborate bar code system that for at least 10 years has allowed the office to track the movement of all files.

Hutchinson County clerk Robin Stroud, who was elected in January 2011, said her office’s preservation efforts work well for the central Panhandle county.

The courthouse’s storage facility includes records stretching back to 1904, when one district court served the county’s criminal, civil and family law cases.

Stroud, who began as a part time employee in 1989, said one of the rooms, which includes county tax and case records, used to be a courtroom gallery for the public before it was remodeled into the storage room.

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"Hanna said microfilm processing, if counties can afford it, is the best insurance policy for aging documents, since electronic records are stored on a hard drive that can easily be wiped out."

All it takes is one fire, tornado, flood, vandalism or theft to wipeout all of the microfilm. Sounds like someone is trying to create some job security. As the owner of a software business, the statement above is completely off base. If documents are scanned electronically, not only could the be readily retrievable and searched for via the WEB, backups and backup of backups and backup of those backups can be made. These documents don't do the public much good if they are stored away on microfilm. Millions and millions of documents can be stored on a single hard drive that costs only $100 and that costs gets cheaper every day. Not only that, electronic documents take up virtually no space at all.

images a day are stored to the computers harddrive, then backed-up to an external harddrive which is 1 terabyte in size and that's capable of storing 5-7 years worth of that daily amount. However, if historic documents are in question, those mentioned in the article are probably best kept original. But my court records can be destroyed to save space...LOL

If my memory serves me correctly, the first indictment in Potter County District Court was filed against Sheriff Jim Gober for shooting and killing the constable, not the mayor and judge. Sheriff Boydston before he retired had a certified copy of the #1 indictment for Sheriff Gober for murder. Sheriff Gober was tried for murder and found not guilty.